At Home My Way

Last night after working on our daughter's house all weekend, I was hungry for real food.  We had eaten all sorts of fast food the past few days - ugh!  Also, I was really tired!  Really, really tired!  For some reason the thought of something yummy in my tummy outweighed the tired last night.  I put a small ham in the oven to bake and when that was ready, whipped up a batch of instant mashed potatoes, dumped some canned green beans in a pot, seasoning them with onion, ham base, and a little bacon grease (which is one of our favorite things to eat),  and mixed up some Homemade Biscuits .  What a feast!  While I had the oven on, I mixed up Tin Can Banana Bread   (which I baked in my oven instead of in my crockpot) and some homemade brownies.  I had absolutely no snacks or breakfasts at my house!  Nada!  It was slim pickings!  But, usually if I think a little bit I can come up with something I can make from m...

We spent the day moving my older daughter.  She bought her first home last week.  Pretty exciting stuff but also lots of hard work!  The place is an adorable bungalow type house and it just needs a little paint and a good cleaning.  We moved her stuff into our box trail er until we can get the house move in ready.  Here she is with the new place: Needless to say, I haven't done much cooking this weekend! I did get a chance to go down to my garden and take a look-see.  It's SLOWLY coming to life.  I have lots of green tomatoes; definitely  I see lots of cherry tomatoes in my future!  I better get the Homemade Ranch Dressing ready ! I picked a few things.  Nothing grand and worthy of canning or a feast, but I'll take it, considering my harvests are usually small and they are prone to being gobbled by turtles, groundhogs, and deer !  Here is a few goodies that I picked tonight.  I think I have enough for a small ba...

The other night I whipped up a batch of Homemade Chocolate Pudding.  I decided to throw CAUTION to the WIND because I didn't have any cornstarch.  My recipe calls for cornstarch.  But I know that flour is also a great thickener so I used flour to see if that worked.  Did it work?  It SURE DID!  I couldn't tell a single bit of difference!  In fact, I will probably use flour now instead of cornstarch.  I don't use much cornstarch in my kitchen and I always have flour so I was glad to discover that as a substitution.  The pudding was thick, chocolatey, and warm.  What a combination, huh? If you haven't tried warm, chocolate pudding, then definitely put that on your list of things to try. I posted this recipe a long time ago when I made my younger daughter's' "Last Supper" before she left to go to Kansas City to college.  But this recipe deserves a post of its own.  It's that good! Pudding is a grea...

This meal is one of those crockpot meals that literally takes 30 seconds to put together.  Anyone who says they don't have time to put dinner in the crockpot needs to try this. I do go ahead and get my crockpot and can of soup out on the counter the night before, and thaw the meat so that I have very little prep time in the morning.  I never seem to have much time in the morning before I leave for work, no matter what time I get up, so quick to put together crockpot meals are lifesavers for me. There's nothing like coming home after a long day to a house smelling like supper's already on the table.  I usually cook some flat wide egg noodles to go with ours but mashed potatoes or rice would also be great.  Also, don't throw away the leftovers because those can be added to a container in your freezer where you might keep leftover vegetables for soup.  I use any leftover gravy, beef, etc. to add into my vegetable soup, w...

My mom always made lots and lots of biscuits when I was growing up.  Given my age...dot, dot, dot, (LOL), some of the homes I grew up in didn't always have air conditioning, eek... hot, hot, hot.  That was also before eating out became quite so "acceptable" nor were we able to find so many prepackaged items for meals - so my mom ALWAYS cooked supper - from scratch - with real food.  No matter how long her workday was or how hot it was, she always cooked supper (and we weren't overweight... go figure).  Usually we had meat, a starch, a vegetable, and either biscuits or cornbread.  If we had spaghetti or tuna casserole, we still had some sort of bread.  Sometimes the bread was my favorite part of supper, since we also wouldn't EVER consider telling my mom "I don't like that."  We just ate it and that was that. When our kitchen was blazing hot, it was a real NO-NO to turn on the oven for obvious reasons.  Mom ...

A few posts ago I posted about having a dilemma when I wanted to bake potatoes for a barbecue but all of my potatoes were super huge.  The solution was that I cubed and seasoned the potatoes and baked them in a casserole dish.  They worked perfectly and tasted as good as any baked potato.   Last night we had an easy supper, bacon sandwiches.  My husband wanted some sort of potatoes (he's a midwest boy through and through) so we cubed some potatoes and made those seasoned potatoes again.  These potatoes work great because you can season them with whatever you have on hand.  Last night we used onion powder, seasoning salt, and parmesan.  I ate mine with a little sour cream.  I think Doug ate his with a little ketchup. Doug is extremely picky.  He mashes his regular baked potato out completely and removes the skin from his plate.  But for these potatoes, he was content to cube them with the peelings on.  You can peel your potat...

What can you do with all of that beet juice leftover from pickling beets?  Don't dump it down the sink.  Make some jelly with it instead! RECIPES AT THE TOP - CHIT CHAT AT THE BOTTOM! Here's how I make Rasberry (Beet) Jelly AT HOME MY WAY: Raspberry Beet Jelly 6 cups beet juice (instructions below) 8 cups sugar (measured into a bowl separately) 1/2 cup lemon juice 1 (6 ounce) package raspberry jello (or two 3-oz packages) 2 packages (1 3/4 oz) pectin (not Ball Brand, only use Surejell) Instructions : To make the juice :  Boil 1/2 gallon of raw, washed beets.  Do not cut off the root or slice them in any way.  Trim beet greens (leaves) to about 1 inch.  Cover the beets in a pot of water (at least 6 cups of water).  Cover and boil 30 minutes or until skins slip off.  The pot of beets/water may swell up (double) so allow room in the pot for expansion.  Let the pot of beets/water cool.  I let mine cool overnight to reall...

I love to make homemade sandwich bread.  I like that it has a little more "bite" to it than store bought bread.  Now,.. we still buy sandwich bread.  But that's only because my husband prefers his sandwiches on super soft, super white bread.  Me?  Not so much!  I like homemade white bread, especially the original recipe found HERE that this recipe for Molasses Light Wheat Bread comes from.  But, I also LOVE wheat bread!  To make wheat bread, I vary the amounts of wheat to white flour in the bread, depending on what I'm in the mood for.  Typically in the winter I want dark, almost bitter wheat bread and I up the wheat to white flour ratio in that type of bread. I made this loaf Sunday, on a hot day in July!  I wanted it for sandwiches (specifically, peanut butter) and for toast!  One time I suggested to my mother-in-law that I love toast made with homemade bread.  She told me that she was afraid to make toast with homemad...

This morning I planned to make homemade pizza for supper.  Well... let me back up.  Last night my husband wanted to order out pizza for supper.  We had some errands to do and just ended up eating leftovers when we got home so I decide this morning to quickly make some pizza crust so that I could make homemade pizza for tonight's supper and avoid that whole $12 pizza thing. I made a half batch of 5 Minute A Day Dough in about 30 seconds flat this morning, stuck it in the fridge, and called her GOOD!  It's that easy and makes two pizzas for this half batch of dough. Quicky instructions for that would be: Measure and stir together gently: 1 1/2 cups hottish (hot but no hurt) water and added: 1 teaspoon yeast (about half a packet) While that was dissolving, I measured  and stirred in a mixing bowl: 3 1/4 cups of all purpose flour 1/2 Tablespoons salt I dumped the yeast/water mixture over and stirred as well as I could to get it all inc...